Sorry I hope I didn't confuse you when I talked about the study of programming languages; that is when a collection of different languages are taken and their different characteristics are studied. I believe that you should focus on a single language rather than the, rather unusual, approach suggested by llmmix.

To finish with all the best with your adventure.

Learn one language and use that language to learn how to solve problems programaticly.Rather than just learning the syntax of many languages before you have grasped how to use a language to break a problem down into smaller manageable units that achieve your goal.

I am sure you will do well.

So go ahead,choose a language and write that first hello world program

best of luck.

"at the same time" doesn't mean it, really.
But sometimes, learning other language help another language when you stuck.
Note that the time isn't short, just plain long to becoming real programmer.

And sure you should start one language first, but before you do it, you have to learn computer structure itself.

I would recommend this book for you, if you can't buy this book, barrow it from public library or university some place.
http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/

This is very true. After I had been using Java a while and moved on to C++ I found out that some of the C++ stuff cleared up some questions I had about Java concepts.

I also just remembered a post I had started a while back about programming language strengths and weaknesses:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=318706

It only has a couple of the major programing languages, but it gives you a brief look at some of their capabillities and what they are commonly used for.

I found this website very helpful for programming resources.
http://linoleum.leapster.org/

Try this : http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/

Sorry for the delay in responding. Its not always the case that it will find the correct libraries. Im begining with C myself so im limited with working with libraries at this time but except for the standard libs like stdin and stdlib i think the rest need to be put on the line with gcc compile command. The gcc man page may clear this up but ATM im at work and cannot look at man pages

I am intrigued by those who learn C++ or Java before C. I'm not saying that you can't do this, but C++ & Java are really extensions of C.

The C language contains all the "basic stuff" - I found it easier to learn this first.

C++ has exactly the same stuff as C, but has several extra concepts that are quite involved.
Java code is almost exactly the same as C++. The Java program will run on all kinds of machines.

C++ has classes, inheritance, operator & function overloading, templates, exception handling etc.

So, with C++ you need to think about the design of your classes:
- what classes are you going to have
- how are they related? Do a class structure diagram showing the inheritance
- what information/variables are going to be in each class
- what constructors is each class going to have?
- what functions is each class going to have? will they be overloaded?
- what operators class going to have? will they be overloaded?

Remember there will be classes to store you data structures and more classes for each dialog box.

These are just some of the extra concepts involved in C++, and to really get the hang of all this probably takes just as long as learning all of C !! Mind you the learning never stops.

It is possible to write C++ code that looks like a C program, but it has function overloading and other bits & pieces but 1 class or no classes. I am asserting that one is not really C++ programming until you have multiple classes with inheritance.

If you are new to programming and want to learn all this at once - then best of luck. This is the "Learn to walk before you run" concept.

Now that I've bullied you into learning C first - I strongly recommend "C Programming" by Kernigan & Ritchie. It starts with "Hello World" & takes you through 1 step at a time. If you do the exercises @ the end of each chapter, it will prove most valuble experience.

When doing your programming, I recommend using an IDE (Integrated Devolpment Environment) like Kdevelop which comes standard with KDE. It's also a good idea to use the command line or emacs for your simple programs - so that you learn about details of compiling and linking.

There you have it - learn C first, then C++, then Java will be easy !!

The worzel68 above has had the courage to say exactly what I was thinking.

The c++ book that I am learning reads like a whirlwind guide of C for the first few chapters.Before then getting into classes,constructors,inheritance overloading,derived classes etc etc.I am thankful that I know C so I can just concentrate on these new extensions.

Also,maybe more importantly;I am beginning to understand why some of the extensions had been implemented.I have written enough C to have thought;wouldn't it be good if i could do such and such,or i didn't need to do such and such in my C code.

Well,I'm sure this will keep the debate going.

I agree that C++ is C with more added but Java is different in that it hides some concepts that newbies have difficulty with, notably pointers and memory management. Learning the basic concepts of OO so that you can start programming is really very little from learning the basic concepts of a procedural language, namely a class and a few methods. So I would say that Java works quite well as a first language, having said that the original request was for programming on Linux and so I see an advantage with learning C first.